"From my summer alcove, which the stars this morn With lucid pearls o'erspread, I've gathered these jessamines, thus to adorn With a wreath thy graceful head. From thy bosom and mouth, they, as flowers, ere death, Ask a purer white, anti a sweeter breath. Their blossoms, a host of bees, alarmed Watched over on jealous wing, Hoarse trumpeters seemed they all, and armed Each bee with a diamond sting: I tore them away, but each flower I tore Has cost me a wound which smarteth sore. Now as I these jessamine flowers entwine, A gift for thy fragrant hair, I must have, from those honey-sweet lips of thine, A kiss for each sting I bear: It is just that the blooms I bring thee home Be repaid by sweets from the golden comb.[107]" His poems in Spanish metres, his letrillas and romances, have the same brilliancy of expression, warmth of emotion, and vivid colouring. The "Ballad of Angelica and Medora" is particularly airy and fresh, but rich and strong as a deep clear inland river that reflects the gorgeous tints of the sky. Gongora surpasses every other Spanish lyrist, in the brilliant colouring of his poetry, and the vivacity of his expression. But all this he voluntarily set at nought. Instead of writing as a poet, he adopted the crabbed critic's art, and, extreme in all things, gave no quarter even to the beauties of his own compositions. He might reprove the diluted interminable poems of Lope, and the unpoetic style of Cervantes; he might have been displeased with the poverty of ideas and enervated conceptions of many of his contemporaries; but he might have been satisfied with his own ease, purity, and strength: he, however, rejected even these, and instituted a system: a new dialect was invented, a new construction adopted,--new words, a dislocated construction, a profusion and exaggeration of figures were introduced. "He rose," one of his disciples writes, "to the sublime height of refinement (_cultura_), which ignorance holds in distaste, and accomplished the greatness off 'Polyphemus,' the 'Soledades,' and other shorter, but not less, poems." He grew almost frantic in the dissemination of his system; and in his vehemence against its opponents, he became lost to poetry, and lives, even to this day, more remembered as a fantastic and ill-judging innovator, than as one of the most natural, brilliant, and imaginative poets that Spain ever produced. Lope de Vega has written a letter, or rather essay, upon Gongora and his system, and gives the following account of both: